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University of California Press

About the Book

Today labor migrants mostly move south to north across the Mediterranean. Yet in the nineteenth century thousands of Europeans and others moved south to North Africa, Egypt, and the Levant. This study of a dynamic borderland, the Tunis region, offers the fullest picture to date of the Mediterranean before, and during, French colonialism. In a vibrant examination of people in motion, Julia A. Clancy-Smith tells the story of countless migrants, travelers, and adventurers who traversed the Mediterranean, changing it forever. Who were they? Why did they leave home? What awaited them in North Africa? And most importantly, how did an Arab-Muslim state and society make room for the newcomers? Combining fleeting facts, tales of success and failure, and vivid cameos, the book gives a groundbreaking view of one of the principal ways that the Mediterranean became modern.

About the Author

Julia Clancy-Smith is Professor of History at the University of Arizona. She is the author of the award-winning Rebel and Saint: Muslim Notables, Populist Protest, Colonial Encounters (UC Press), among other books.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations and Maps
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Note on Transliteration

Introduction: Peoplings

1. Arrival: Tunis the “Well-Protected”

2. Detours: Migrations in a Mobile World

3. Making a Living: Domestic Service and Other Forms of Employment

4. Making a Living: Petty Commerce, Places of Sociability, and the Down-and-Out

5. Making a Living: The Sea, Contraband, and Other Illicit Activities

6. From Protection to Protectorate: Justice, Order, and Legal Pluralism

7. Muslim Princes and Trans-Mediterranean Missionaries

8. Where Elites Meet: Households, Harim Visits, and Sea Bathing

9. Khayr al-Din al-Tunisi and a Mediterranean Community of Thought

Epilogue: Fetched Up on the Maghrib’s Shores

Notes
Glossary
Select Bibliography
Index

Reviews

“Clancy-Smith’s exceptional and magisterial book is a particularly welcome addition to the literature on Mediterranean history. . . . This book is an embarrassment of riches.”
American Historical Review
“The importance and relevance of this book cannot be underestimated.”
Reviews in History
“The book is replete with fascinating details about life in a multicultural and politically precarious city seeking to maintain a measure of autonomy while adapting to the winds of change blowing from Europe.”
CHOICE
“Clancy-Smith is forging new vistas and prospects for future historical research. Students of North Africa, Europe, and the Mediterranean would do well to follow her once more into the breach.”
Journal of African History
“There is not an area where the author does not show profound knowledge and grasp of the material concerning Europeans in host societies. This book may well remain as a cornerstone for future research.”
European Review of History: Revue européenne d'histoire
“Clancy-Smith’s remarkable monograph sheds light on the myriad facets that makes the area so beguiling.”
Journal of Colonial & Colonialism History
“Julia A. Clancy-Smith deserves great credit. . . . Mediterraneans is a work of fundamental importance for our knowledge of migratory movements, precolonial and colonial structures of control, labor and gender relations, and cultural negotiations in the Mediterranean region and beyond.”
Journal of Modern History
“There is little doubt that [this book] will become a standard for historical scholarship about the Maghrib and the Mediterranean. . . . [It is] is an important study not only for those interested in Mediterranean and Maghribi history, but for anyone interested in the history of migration around the Mediterranean basin.”
Bulletin of SOAS
"From the anonymous Sicilian fishermen to Maltese coachmen, smugglers and burglars, from Sardinian female servants to French women missionaries and Ottoman future statesmen, Julia Clancy-Smith draws a lively, poetic, portrait of the thousands of migrants who came to Tunisia in the 19th century, changing its space, rhythms and sounds long before the advent of French colonial rule: An ethnographic journey through 19th-century Tunisia that beautifully captures the spirit of the place."—Lucette Valensi, author of The Birth of the Despot: Venice and the Sublime Porte

"In this meticulously researched, beautifully written work, Clancy-Smith has used an extraordinary array of sources from administrative and legal documents to personal letters and testimonies to bring the nineteenth-century Mediterranean world alive. Covering a wide range of situations from domestic service to contraband and exploring both the personal, legal, and administrative dimensions of each, she demonstrates the different ways in which private and public spheres intersected. The book is essential reading not only for scholars and students but also for anyone interested in gender, migration and the societies of the Mediterranean."—Patricia Lorcin, author of Imperial Identities

"In her groundbreaking study of population movements, Clancy-Smith reconceptualizes the nineteenth-century history of North Africa by inserting the 'missing' people into the social fabric. She shows the roles these Southern Europeans of modest means played in creating a borderland society whose impact continued during the colonial period. Mediterraneans opens new windows into power structures, labor history, issues of gender, and social and cultural negotiations, along the way replacing binary constructions with a much more complicated world."—Zeynep Çelik, author of Empire, Architecture, and the City: French-Ottoman Encounters, 1830-1914.

Awards

  • The 2013 L. Carl Brown AIMS Book Prize, Honorable Mention 2013, American Institute for Maghrib Studies
  • Alf Andrew Heggoy Book Prize 2011, French Colonial History Society
  • Best Subsequent Book Award 2011, Phi Alpha Theta History Honor Society